The State Department says all of the potential secret information in former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails has knocked them off pace, and told a federal judge late Friday that’s why they are currently in violation of his orders.

John F. Hackett, the top open-records officer for the department, said the government belatedly realized all of the potentially classified information in Mrs. Clinton’s communications and, prodded by two watchdogs, realized they needed to be running her emails by intelligence officers to make sure they weren’t giving out secrets.

So the State Department, to explain why they are being so slow to release the emails, is basically announcing to the public that they contain classified information, which is never supposed to be sent on a private email account.

I suppose someone can try to claim that they are only worried about this possibility and that they haven’t found anything classified yet. But that doesn’t sound likely.

Mrs. Clinton and her allies had repeatedly insisted she didn’t transact any classified business on her email account, which she issued to herself on a private server she kept at her home in New York, rather than using an official secure State Department account.

But an inspector general said there was information that should have been classified at the time Mrs. Clinton was sending it, and now that the emails are being released per Judge Contreras‘ orders, the State Department is having to go through and redact all of that information.